WHAT do Peter Lilley, Andrew Tyrie, Philip Davies Christopher Chope and I have in common?

We were the only MPs to vote against the 2008 Climate Change Bill, which is to say we had by then considered all the evidence and found it wanting.

For years we have endured insults.

Behind the scenes Fiona Bruce, normally the most courteous of broadcasters, called me a “flat-earther” to my face.

Others branded us “deniers” as if we were disputing the holocaust. The Al Gore film was accorded the status of Holy Writ. David Bellamy lost his job. Doubting scientists were scorned.

Nigel Lawson found it difficult to get his book An Appeal To Reason published.

In short there was an orthodoxy which was enforced with all the rigour of communism or fascism or, for that matter, the Spanish Inquisition. Dissenters must not be heard and global warming became a religion.

This graph shows the end of the world isn’t nigh. But for anyone – like myself – who has been vilified for holding such an unfashionable view, possibly the most important thing about it is its source: the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC has been sounding the alarm about man-made global warming. Yet here, in a draft of its latest report, is a diagram overlaying the observed temperature of the earth on its predictions.

The graph shows a world stubbornly refusing to warm. Indeed, it shows the world is soon set to be cooler.

The awkward fact is that the earth has warmed just 0.5 degrees over the past 50 years. And Met Office records show that for the past 16 years temperatures have plateaued and, if anything, are going down.

David Bellamy still has the most wonderful face. He is pink-cheeked and beaming, his nose is impossibly broken and squashed, his eyes are kind, his hair and beard are now white but still lustrous and his vast fleshy ears are bobbing with hearing aids.

‘Come in! Come in! Sit wherever you like, that’s a comfy seat there,’ he booms, waving his hands and pointing with enormous sausage fingers. ‘Rosemary! Can we have some tea, please?

ROOOOSEMARY!’ he roars in the general direction of the kitchen and his wife of 56 years.

‘She’s the love of my life, you know. I adoooore her. We met in Love Lane in Cheam when she was just 17 and I just knew. We used to canoodle on the train together. Ooh, I’m the luckiest man in the world. I married a wonderful woman, I’ve toured the world, I’ve stood on the top of the world, I’ve made more than 400 television programmes and I’ve had one of the most woooonderful lives . . .

They share a name – David – and a passion for nature. For a while they also shared a place in the vanguard of nature documentary-making, broadcasting from every corner of the globe to the homes of millions. But while one, Attenborough, basks in the glow of national treasure status, the other claims he is now a pariah.

"You're early," David Bellamy roars, dropping the wheelbarrow he is pushing around his four-acre garden in Co Durham. He strides towards me, all rolling gait, unruly white hair and beard. "Go inside while I just finish off."

Though he turns 80 next Friday, Bellamy has a remarkable physique for a man his age, over 6ft tall and slender, muscular even, despite a little trouble when he walks. The voice and appearance have stayed in pretty good nick since his heyday as a scientist, conservationist and TV personality. He was a household name, inspiring Lenny Henry's "grapple me grapenuts" catchphrase and even a Ribena commercial.

Hundreds of protesters were joined by conservationist David Bellamy on Saturday in a march against a proposed wind farm.

Campaigners said about 350 people took part in the protest through an area of the Lammermuir Hills in the Scottish Borders, where 48 turbines could be built.

The Say No To Fallago group argues that unspoiled countryside will be threatened by the construction.

Developers insist the area is remote and would enjoy access to a nearby power line - and accused Bellamy, who is a professor of adult and continuing education at Durham University and a special professor of botany at Nottingham Unviersity, of being "discredited" for his views on climate change.

A formal decision on the application is due from a second public inquiry.

In a statement, Professor Bellamy said: "The outcome of the public inquiry into this wind farm application will be a watershed moment.

Prof Rees and Dr Cicerone write that “straightforward physics tells us that this rise [in CO 2 concentrations] is warming the planet. Calculations demonstrate that this effect is very likely responsible for the gradual warming observed over the past 30 years and that global temperatures will continue to rise – superimposing a warming on all the other effects that make climate fluctuate. Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise, stemming largely from the ‘feedback’ effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research”.

The basic physics is correct, but the uncertainties referred to are largely unreported in newspapers. Using the same physics the 19 major climate models produce very different answers, the more extreme of which are usually used to drive the climate debate.

There is no evidence of carbon dioxide being a poison, or that it is capable of causing a warming Armageddon. What follows is a summary of the proof — straight from real science, peer-reviewed over the past 232 years by legions of physicists, thanks to Newton’s Principia.

Remember the famous picture of Miss Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blown high? Even at the age of 76, when I see this picture my temperature goes up — followed by the amount of carbon dioxide I exhale. Never the other way ’round. Now, thanks to the study of a series of ice cores, this appears to be an inconvenient truth for the global warming industry.

Al Gore used this ice core data to claim that carbon dioxide made the temperature of the world rise, threatening life on earth, because there was a correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the world’s average temperature. Yet the data from the much-celebrated Vostok ice cores paints a very different picture: Up goes the temperature, followed by a rise in carbon dioxide.

WORLD-RENOWNED botanist and broadcaster Prof David Bellamy has predicted the world will get cooler over the next 30 years rather than warmer, as many climate scientists have predicted.

He said a period of global cooling had already begun, citing evidence that the Alps had more snow last winter than at any time for the last 26 years.

Prof Bellamy has been one of the best-known sceptics of man-made global warming, despite being an environmentalist. Yesterday, as patron of the Tree Appeal, he helped children at Cabinteely Community School to plant trees. The initiative aims to plant 100,000 trees in the UK and Ireland to encourage biodiversity and to act as a learning resource.

Prof Bellamy said temperature fluctuations are part of the natural process. “The argument [for man-made global warming] is going downhill. Climate change is a completely natural thing. It is based on the sun, and at the moment we are into the 24th sun cycle and there has been no sunspots for two years. The last time that happened, the Thames froze over.”

“Within days of the distinguished British environmentalist, Dr David Bellamy reminding New Zealanders that carbon dioxide is the world’s best friend, a desperate local politician has described it as a pollutant and proposes to cripple our economy with charges for its emissions.” This statement from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition in response to the explanation by Climate Change Minister Nick Smith: “New Zealand needs an emissions trading scheme to discourage carbon pollution...”

“In their zeal to confuse the public, politicians like Minister Smith use the term ‘carbon’ when they are referring to the odourless, colourless gas, carbon dioxide (CO2) that comprises just 3.62% of so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases in the atmosphere, of which just 3.4% is human caused, meaning that the human contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is a miniscule 0.123%, the equivalent of 12 cents in $100.